Urbanization in Transition and Coordinated Regional Development: Challenges under Global Change

Dear Colleagues,

Human society has reached an urban era, with more than half of the population living in urban settlements. Urbanization has brought us economic prosperity, innovation and an improved quality of life; however, at the same time, it has raised a series of challenges to the sustainable development of our urban world in multiple dimensions. This Special Issue takes the recent global dynamics and crisis as a starting point for research, focusing on how regions, cities and places are affected by and respond to ongoing global challenges such as climate change, resource depletion, socio-spatial disparity, national populism, the COVID-19 pandemic, international trade conflicts and broader geopolitical instability. We particularly aim to explore how new opportunities, patterns, structures of urbanization and industrialization potentially emerge, what new regional problems are generated and how cities and regions adapt, coordinate and cooperate at multiple scales to resolve challenges. We regard the current fast-changing global challenges not only as crises with simply negative impacts, but also as a context of pressure, or even as an asset of legitimization, which may open up new opportunities for regional change and transformation. It has become evident that less-favored regions in particular, such as resource-based cities, border cities, peripheries, inland cities with disadvantaged locations and old industrial areas, are confronted with more challenges under recent global change. This SI welcomes papers examining how modes of regional development and urbanization in less-favored regions evolve and shift, both in developed and emerging economies.

We welcome papers with strong contextual sensitivity with regard to global change. Particular attention will be paid to papers contributing empirical knowledge to the literature or engaging in critical review/revisions of existing studies. We also encourage papers providing updated references of theories involving urbanization, uneven regional development, regional coordination, regional governance, regional resilience, global value/supply resilience and industrial restructuring/path development. Contributions from emerging economies in the Global South, in the field of urban geography, economic geography, urban studies, planning, international business, and public administration, are of particular interest. Topics of interest include, but not are limited to: 

• New dynamics, forms and trends of urbanization under global change;
• Regional cooperation, coalitions, integration and institutional coupling;
• Regional poverty, disparity and poverty alleviation;
• Urban–rural disparity and integrated development;
• Globalization and new dynamics and forms of world city networks;
• Global value chain resilience, strategic coupling/decoupling, global/national supply chain and regional economic resilience;
• Socio-economic adaptation, adaptability and new dynamics of less-favored regions;
• Challenges and policy solutions to various types of agglomeration economies, e.g., small industrial towns, industrial clusters and industrial zones/parks;
• Sustainability transitions in regions and cities, regional green industry emergence and development, mode shifts of regional production and consumption;
• Rescaling, regional governance and planning.

You may choose our Joint Special Issue in International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

Prof. Dr. Gengzhi Huang
Dr. Xiaohui Hu
Guest Editors

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• urbanization
• regional uneven development
• regional coordination
• regional governance
• regional sustainability transitions
• regional resilience
• global value chain resilience
• less-favored regions
• urban-rural integration
• poverty alleviation